


One Less Secret, One Less Lie

by BeckySinger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 9x07 Speculation, Brother Feels, Child Neglect, Father-Son Relationship, M/M, Memories, No Wincest, Other, Pre-Series Events, Sexual Coercion, Underage Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 21:04:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1048555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeckySinger/pseuds/BeckySinger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on the previews for and speculation about episode 9x07, "Bad Boys."  What really led to Dean's stay in a home for delinquent boys?  Would first offense shoplifting really warrant that?  What is bad enough that it makes Sam cry?</p><p>Dean-centric, character-driven piece.  No Wincest.  Covers family relationships, and, fair warning, John is not very pleasantly portrayed.  Destiel is mentioned in passing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Less Secret, One Less Lie

**Author's Note:**

> The standard disclaimer applies. I do not own the show or its characters. I'm just taking them out to play.

The first time Dean Winchester is propositioned by a man, he’s four months past his fifteenth birthday, learning how to hustle pool from his father in a dive bar on the outskirts of New Orleans.  John nearly beats the guy to death in the alley out back.  

Dean doesn’t forget what he yelled over and over as he punched and kicked the guy senseless, a string of curses and insults, mostly, but also, “My son _is not_ and _never will be_ a cocksucking faggot like you!” 

When the guy can no longer even attempt to stand up, Dean is finally able to pull John away and convince him to leave town, playing the Sam card.  If John gets himself arrested and sentenced, Dean tells him, he and Sam will have to go into foster care, and they’d likely be split up.  John relents.  They leave the guy in the alley, go straight back to the motel, grab Sam, and are out of Louisiana and into Mississippi by dawn.  Dean still doesn’t know if the guy survived the beating.

The second time Dean is propositioned by a man in a bar, he’s just turned sixteen, and is attempting to hustle pool in yet another dive on the seedy side of St. Louis.  John’s been gone for over a week, when he was only supposed to be gone three days, hasn’t checked in by phone for four, and Sam has hit a growth spurt that has him eating everything he can get his hands on.  Dean has stopped eating breakfast, and lunch on days he's not at school, and only takes a little of the food he makes for Sam’s dinner, trying to make the food and the money John left last longer, but it’s dwindling fast. 

It’s a slow night.  Dean’s pool skills are pretty good, but nobody’s playing, at least not for money.  He thought about venturing into another bar, but this one is just across the street from the motel.  He’s afraid to go too far away from Sam for too long.  He is putting on his jacket to leave when the guy catches him by the elbow and whispers in his ear that he will pay him three hundred dollars to see those pretty pink lips of his wrapped around his cock. 

Dean’s stomach growls, and he thinks of the five dollars he has left in his pocket to feed Sammy with for who knows how much longer.  He thinks of the worst case scenario, that John is dead, and, if he is, he doesn’t have enough money to get himself and his little brother to Bobby’s by bus.  He’d tried to call Bobby earlier in the day to see if he could wire them a loan, but there was no answer at any of his numbers, landline or mobile.  Cell reception was not the best in those days, after all, especially off the beaten track, where a lot of hunts took place.  He takes the guy up on his offer, and follows him willingly to his elderly Oldsmobile, where he shoves the front passenger seat forward as much as he can, and kneels in the backseat foot well.  The guy doesn’t have a condom, which almost has Dean out the door, but hunger and fear that he won’t be able to get himself and Sam to Bobby’s if something goes wrong win out this time.  He never again goes into a bar without at least one condom in his pocket, just in case.

He knows the basic mechanics of this, of course.   Guys talk in the restrooms and locker rooms at school.  He’d even seen a couple of pertinent scenes in pornos when new friends would show him their fathers’ stash, but they’d been too afraid of awkwardness and getting caught to watch much.  Still, knowing and doing are two different things.  Dean also hates to admit it, but he’s thought about doing this, and having it done to him, just not under these circumstances.  He knows he’s not gay, because he’s just as interested in girls, if not more so, but he has had the occasional wet dream and errant thought.  He squashes them down, just like everything else unwanted or crappy in his life.

Dean is tentative at first.  He takes just the head, but startled by the taste, tries to go straight in and swallow him down, to get this over with faster.   He gags instead, causing bile to churn in his nearly empty stomach.  The guy stops him, tells him to start off easy, talks him through it until he’s very close to coming, which is when he stops talking at all, dissolving into pants and moans, holding the back of Dean’s head and thrusting into his mouth.  It’s all Dean can do not to fight it, to relax his throat and swallow like he’s been told.  He’s having trouble breathing, too, but it doesn’t last long.  The guy comes, tells Dean to keep swallowing, and then, when he’s done he lets go.  Dean is left with a strange bitter taste on the back of his tongue, and the urge to puke, but he’s not moving without the money.   The guy tucks himself back into his jeans, and fishes three crisp hundreds out of his wallet, hands them to Dean, and swings the car door open. 

Dean walks away, toward an out-of-place row of hedges between the dive and a convenience store, where he throws up harder than he has since he got food poisoning two years ago.  Then he goes to the convenience store restroom, splashes water on his face and rinses out his mouth before heading down the block to the diner they’d eaten in their first day here, where he gets the first decently filling meal he’s had in days—a bacon cheeseburger, a large order of fries, a Coke, and a slice of apple pie—to go, along with a large order of fries and a vanilla milkshake for Sam.  

John comes back the next day.  When Dean asks what happened that he couldn’t call, his father doesn’t give him a real answer, just tells him that he got caught up in the hunt and figured Dean was old enough to take care of things for a few days.  Dean says nothing, just clenches his jaw against the nausea and fury that’s threatening to turn him inside out.

The third time Dean Winchester is propositioned by a man is when it all goes to Hell.  This is the turning point, and the learning experience.  It isn’t the last time he’ll take a guy up on an offer, but it’s the last time he’ll do it so guilelessly.   He’s still sixteen, this time in a dive in some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town in upstate New York.   John has been gone six days this time, five without checking in, and again, Sam is eating them out of house and home, figuratively speaking.   This time is not so desperate as last time, because he has ten dollars instead of five left, plus a little bit left from St. Louis.  He’s eaten less of their food himself than last time, and he’s getting sick of this.   He uses that money left from St. Louis to buy his way into a card game, and for a while, it looks like he’s going to make enough money to set Sam and himself up for good eating and two bus tickets to Bobby’s if necessary, but then he gets a little too cocky with his bets, is dealt a bad hand, and loses it all.  He’s back to ten bucks for God-knows-how-long.

As he goes to leave, a guy catches his sleeve.  He offers him two hundred dollars to blow him.  Again, Dean thinks of how hungry he is, of the uncertainty of his father’s whereabouts and whether he’s alive or dead.  He thinks about, if John is really gone this time, how much it would cost to get from upstate New York to Bobby’s house in Sioux Falls.  He accepts.  It was the wrong decision.  He finds out too late that this guy is an undercover cop.  This bar was the target of a sting operation by the State Police, as they’d gotten wind of all sorts of sordid and illegal things happening here, underage prostitution being one of them.  (After this, Dean learns to spot undercover cops the same way he learned to spot vampires, shapeshifters, and the other things his father teaches him to hunt.  He’s never caught again, not for this.)  

It’s Bobby that Dean uses his one phone call on.  At this point in his life, he has never been so thankful as when Bobby picks up the phone and tells him he’s in Erie, Pennsylvania, not far away.  Dean tells him he’s been arrested for stealing.  Of course, when Bobby gets there the next morning with a hung over John in tow, they find out the truth.  If Bobby hadn’t stopped John, hadn’t reminded him that they were in a police station, Dean knows he would have gotten the same treatment as the guy in the New Orleans alley.  He sees the same kind of disgust and hatred etched into his father’s face.  Dean stays silent the whole time.  His only excuses are lack of money and hunger, things he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, say in the police station, because he fears foster care and being permanently separated from Sam more than he fears anything else.  He’s already told the police that he did what he did because he lost his Dad’s money at cards and was trying to get it back.  He refuses to say more.

Bobby takes Sam back to Sioux Falls with him.  (Dean finds out more than a decade later that, before Bobby leaves, he threatens John with emergency custody proceedings if he doesn’t straighten up.)  John goes with Dean to Court, and because it’s his first offense, he gets what amounts to a slap on the wrist.  He’s sent to a home for delinquent boys for a couple of months, where the boys learn and do farm work when they’re not in school.  John doesn’t look at him at all the whole time they’re in Court, doesn’t speak to him when he’s taken away.  He just signs the papers the Court-appointed lawyers put in front of him.  Other than missing Sam, this would prove to be a very good thing for Dean.  He spends two months straight sleeping in the same bed, going to the same school, reading library copies of Vonnegut and Kerouac and Salinger in the hay loft, doing the same chores, and eating well-balanced meals at an actual table.  He even makes friends and has the same girlfriend for longer than a week.  He has an adult in his life besides Bobby that he can actually talk to, and who insists on hugging him, even if he fights it.  (Though, the truth is, he likes the hugging.)  If Sam had been there, it basically would’ve been Heaven.  The guy who ran the home, Sonny, wasn’t too much older than Dean. 

This was Sonny’s first gig after finishing his Master’s in Social Work, he tells Dean, and his undergraduate work had been in criminal justice.  He tells Dean that he had ended up in a place like this as a teenager, after his mother had died in a car accident and his father had checked out in favor of spending all his time with Jack Daniels, so he knew the difference it could make.  He wanted to help, and he wanted Dean to know that he could talk to him about anything and he wouldn’t judge him.

After waking up the other boys, screaming because of the recurring nightmare of watching his mother burn, Sonny presses Dean to talk to him.  Dean doesn’t want to, but he needs to.  He finds out that Sonny’s father had been a hunter before he got married.  Grief hadn’t sent Sonny’s father back into hunting, but some of Sonny’s family continued and he’d heard enough that he believed Dean’s story about his mother’s death.  Then Dean tells him how he landed here, tells him about being hungry and almost out of money, and about St. Louis, begs him not to report his father to Social Services, swears he won’t repeat this mistake, and swears that it will get better for his brother and himself once he’s eighteen, which is now less than two years away.  Sonny takes pity on him and keeps his secrets.

When his time is up, he’s surprised to find John waiting for him in the Impala.  They don’t talk about what he did, or why, only what they’re going to tell Sam.  John decides they should tell Sam that Dean went hunting alone and got lost.

This is the story Dean sticks to until his lies, all of them, start to catch up to him, but this one first. 

When Dean gets out of Purgatory, he lands in Maine.  On his way South to reincarnate Benny, he detours to see Sonny, once again confiding in him, not too many details, just the bit about there being Leviathans (and that they were gone), and spending a year in Purgatory, about not being able to save Cas.  Sonny listens to it all, free of judgment, offers him a hot meal and hugs him when he goes to leave.  He lets Sonny know he’s back in business and gives him his latest phone number, and continues to do so every time it changes.

Then, one day, Sonny calls for his help.  Something’s terrorizing the kids in his care.  Dean tells Sam the half-truth, that he’d lost their money in a card game and been arrested for stealing food, and that as a result, he’d been sent to a boys’ home.  Sam doesn’t press at first, but the deeper they get into the case, the more Sam finds out about Dean’s life there, and the more questions he asks.  He does some research, and finds out the penalty is all wrong for a first-time shoplifting offense by a juvenile in New York at that time. 

Finally, after the hunt is over and they’re sitting around Sonny’s kitchen table with Sam asking even more questions, and Sonny just observing them both, clearly trying to decide if he should intervene, Dean breaks.  He tells Sam that’s not the whole truth, but that he doesn’t want to…That he _can’t_ talk about it.  Dean’s tone, the tears in his eyes, the way his voice cracks shuts Sam up.  The silence in the room is deafening.

“Dean,” Sonny says softly, “If you want Sam to know, I can tell him.   And if you don’t, that’s okay, too.”

Sam stays silent.

Dean takes a long, ragged breath.  He’s been telling so many lies lately, and being here has brought things back to mind he hasn’t thought about in years, all the things he did to protect them both, to make sure they had food and clothes and that the motel got paid so they wouldn’t get kicked out before John got back, coming up with cover stories so no one called Social Services.  Sam’s no longer a child, even though Dean’s been treating him like one, and it’s cost him.  They’re together, but he feels more distant from his brother than he has in a long time, because this time it’s his fault.  It’s not circumstances, it’s not demons or monsters or apocalypses or trials, it’s his inability to let Sam go, which led to the most colossal error in judgment he may have ever made.  He can’t let him know that anything is wrong right now, not when he’s still not sure Sam is healed.   He thinks that maybe this would buy him some time, and he has to admit that Sam knowing the truth about this would be a kind of relief.  Besides, otherwise, he’s just going to have to deal with the badgering all the way back to Kansas, and he doesn’t put it past Sam to see if Kevin could hack into his New York juvenile record.  Then they’d both know, and as much as he doesn’t want to explain it to Sam, he wants to explain it to Kevin even less.

“Go ahead.  Tell him how I ended up here, all of it.  I’m going for a walk,” he says.  There are still unshed tears in his eyes, and his voice still sounds caught on a sob.  He gets up from the table and walks out the backdoor, heading toward the fields. 

When he gets to edge of the property, he climbs up on the split-rail fence, sits down, and lets the tears fall.  He sobs until he can’t catch his breath and nearly loses his lunch.  He cries for his younger self, for his little brother who knew nothing because John and Dean and Bobby all conspired to keep him in the dark.  He cries because he’s never been able to own the truth about himself, always trying to be hyper-masculine so his father wouldn’t be reminded of his sin, then later because he felt a desperate need to keep the façade he’d built intact. 

Dean cries for Cas, whom he loves (and not just as family, though he’d never admit it aloud because he thinks he doesn’t deserve him) and misses like crazy, who once told him he knew everything about him the instant he touched his soul in Hell, who was the one who put him back together, and who still thought Dean was the best human he’d ever met, the brightest soul he’d seen in his millennia-long life.  He cries because he still hasn’t told Cas the truth about why he kicked him out of the bunker, and doesn’t know when or if he’ll be able to tell him, when or if he’ll be able to let him come back. 

He cries because it’s all hit him at once, now that the dam has broken.  So much of his life is nothing but a web of lies, and he can’t find a way out.  He’s been to the fairy realm (where he actually was forced to service Oberon, King of the Fairies), Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, and he always winds up right back here, on Earth, with a multitude of secrets and lies.  He knows the truth will come out, it’s just a matter of time, but all he can do is take it one disintegrating secret and lie at a time, starting now.

Finally, he stops and wipes his face on his shirt.  A few minutes later, he looks up and sees Sam striding toward him, tears streaming down _his_ face.  He pulls Dean down off the fence, and nearly crushes him in a hug.

“Dean,” he says, and swallows, still crushing him.  “I never knew…”  Sam chokes on his words.  “I am so sorry, Dean.  I don’t know what else to say.”

“Sam, stop it,” Dean says, tearing up again, and pulling away to swipe at his eyes in frustration.  “It’s over.  It happened.  It’s not happening anymore.  We can’t change it.”  There’s truth in this, at least.  He hasn’t turned any tricks in years.

Sam pulls a wadded up piece of paper towel out of his pocket, shakes it out, and wipes his face.  “I wish we could,” he says.

“Me, too, Sammy.  Me, too,” he says quietly, then loops an arm around Sam and guides him back to the driveway and the Impala in silence. 

They don’t talk about it again.  For Dean, it’s enough that Sam knows.  It’s one less secret between them, one bit of distance closed.   For Sam, it’s the same, for now.


End file.
